


A Mad Tea Party

by dorothy_notgale, Tromperie



Series: Grim Tales [6]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Compulsive sexual behavior, Court, Family Visit, I lived bitch, Infidelity, Loneliness, Louis no, M/M, PLatRoA era, consort louis, spite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-16 10:50:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14809944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tromperie/pseuds/Tromperie
Summary: “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”Armand's family visits the Chateau in Auvergne, the seat of Lestat's vampire court. While there, Armand and Daniel Learn more than they'd perhaps like about things they can't change--"things" mainly being Lestat's beloved consort, bound and suffering pressure to please the strange demon behind the Prince's eyes.





	A Mad Tea Party

Armand left the prepaid cell phone behind when he and his boarded a private jet bound for France. Silenced or not, it seemed too much a risk to have such a thing on his person. Too obvious.

He disliked being on aeroplanes with Daniel. It reminded him of things which could never be forgotten.

His children worried little, Benji busying himself packing and repacking his equipment, Sybelle quietly optimistic at the prospect of being reunited with her beau. Her fingers danced over sheet music of duets.

“Boss.” Daniel was cold against his side, long and lean and as beautiful as ever, eyes shining and mostly focused.

“My love.” Armand allowed himself to touch his lover’s blushed lips, a liberty Daniel accepted and more, breath ghosting almost panic-fast over his fingertips. “Is there anything you require?”

Once, it would have been the fully-stocked wet bar that held Daniel’s attention, Armand pouring and watching as the alcohol worked its magic to flush cheeks and glaze eyes, feeling it fuzzing a sharp mind.

If Daniel still drank in the secondhand way of their kind, he took care to hide it. Perhaps it simply no longer appealed. Armand himself had been like that once: so many of his mortal days had slipped by in a drunken haze, plied between his ever more willing lips until it became a welcome pastime.

"Why're we doing this?" Daniel's body was stiff. He caught Armand's fingers and began to worry at them with his thumb.

"We have always been welcome there." Armand was already half into his mask, though there were hours to go before arrival.

"Don't bullshit me. You'd've built a moat back home if you could get the zoning."

Poor, curious Daniel. The games that were so second nature to Armand were mysteries to his forthright, earnest fledgling. The journalist. A habit he was imparting to Benji.

"Benji was invited to spread news of the Court to those who cannot see it. We will go, we will be polite, and we will return home. Simple."

"What about you?" The slight, eternal shadow at Daniel's jaw was a soothing scratch against Armand's palm. "You've been there for all of it. You're not gonna sit in?"

"I have never wanted authority. You know that." The fact had even made it into Lestat's books, which Daniel had read and marked faithfully over the years, picking at the dubious things until they fell to pieces.

Daniel shifted restlessly. “I thought you liked _some_ authority.” His eyes were so bright, and so opaque, looking into Armand’s. No way to hear what he was thinking, though one could guess.

He’d dreamed of Armand’s lost lover, as he died. That fantasy had been there, almost real, as his body changed and the wall grew up between them. The loss of connection had felt like a mortal dying; it was nothing Armand had felt since the fire in Venice.

All minds were open to his in some way, a pain and a weapon, a tool and a comfort, and he’d suddenly realized perhaps _why_ all fledglings grew to hate their makers.

Not because of the damnation.

The silence.

Without that touch, there was no way to remain perfect, no easy solution; no surety that one fed one’s lover’s desires, rather than one’s own delusions.

Sybelle shifted, her face smooth and intense as she looked at Armand and _reached_ for him without moving.

He went to her, pulling gently free of Daniel's hold to take her hand. She tugged him closer still, laying her forehead against his. She was hearing Antoine's music, and the music was him, further and further in the past and steeped in melancholy. Armand tried to give her comfort, bright plots of flowers as he had seen them painted if not as he remembered. Flowers. A lovely, walled garden.

Sybelle scattered the image like smoke. The music was the same strain over and over, Antoine receding into the distance—Sybelle's form trembled, her hands tightening into fists.

 _There._ He gathered her into his arms, vowing to find them some pocket of time. _He must stay._

Jealousy. This he didn't understand. Or he did, too well, the shape and color of it. But they both went to see their lost loves now. He cautioned her as best he could, and she shut him out.

"I know." Her eyes were very hard, and Armand saw Benji and Daniel shift uneasily at the change in the room. They were all looking to Armand.

"I'll see to it that all goes well," he promised, as they wanted to hear.

"See?" Daniel muttered quietly, but let the subject lie.

Armand had never liked authority, but _control_ —that was where safety lay. Predictability.

This was what he thought of while the death sleep rose up to take them, as they flew through a day made short by the turning of a world below. His dreams were of odd duration, and disturbing as well—perhaps because of the unnaturalness of it all.

Nevertheless, they disembarked in Paris at dusk and traveled rapidly on to Clermont-Ferrand, and then.

Then it was a limousine driven by a flat-eyed mortal, the same one who had been holding a sign scrawled “Le Russe + Malloy Family”, and who had loaded their belongings with their meager mortal strength though Benji alone could have carried it all with no effort. Daniel stared out tinted glass and mapped the buildings as though memorizing them, or perhaps searching for differences; had they ever passed through here? Armand didn’t care to recall.

Sybelle’s foot in its little sequined heel tapped a measured tattoo against the floorboard; her smooth, uncovered arms and legs would have stuck painfully to the leather upholstery were she alive, but she wasn’t.

Benji fussed with his camera and his recorder, and Armand forced himself not to intercede with the machines, not to examine and test and destroy.

He still bought computers and broke them into pieces, studying the chips and wires and thin strips of copper. He had even begun interacting with the internet. While Lestat pattered away on his typewriter and told their fictionalized exploits, Armand quietly uploaded videos of himself: his eyes, staring: his skin healing from grievous wounds; the destruction of the toys he touched. Thousands of strangers stumbled upon him unawares, then passed safely again into different lives. They brushed him and didn't die. It reminded him of discovering the wonder of long-distance calls; it was novel.

Their little family (what remained) was met at the gates, led through snow they couldn't feel across the fields and up the steps to a grand entryway. Armand tensed instinctively at the feeling of other vampires' minds. It would be sensible to kill who he could, mark a defensible little patch for him and his, prove that he wasn't one to be trifled with.

But that was no good anymore, was it. The vampires who had come into his home, Notker and Seth and all the other new ancients (even his maker) had all delighted in pointing out how weak he was, how his presence was little more than tolerated. He survived now on the whims of those stronger than he. It was a familiar feeling.

Sybelle took his hand, her thin fingers squeezing his palm.

"What, no red carpet?" Daniel strolled through the space with his hands in his pockets and the air of one who'd long accepted his death might be imminent and preferred to enjoy the ride. "I'm gonna have to knock a star off the rating."

"You think they've started without us?" Benji was at Daniel's side, still taking his equipment apart and rearranging it as they walked, head all but spinning to try and take in every detail for later.

Armand said nothing to that irrelevancy, trusting that it would be answered naturally soon enough (as though there were any chance that Lestat would postpone his own pleasures for the sake of guests.)

Yet, it _was_ oddly quiet and subdued as they made their way in, given minimal direction from mortal servants and assured that their things would be taken to their rooms. “The salon,” they were told, was the place to go, and so they did.

Soft murmur of voices, some pitched low enough that only preternatural hearing allowed conversation at all. The room contained a small coterie of the dead, both vampires clad in flesh and ghosts in figment. All beautiful, of course. All paired, fledgling-to-master, lover-to-lover, twosomes clear and simple. Only the most important duo were conspicuously absent.

An aimless violin could be heard over it all.

Sybelle swayed for a moment with the sound, eyes closed, hearing some message in the notes that passed Armand by. After a moment she released his hand and took small, sure strides across the room. The click of her heels seemed to become louder as conversations hushed, eyes subtly and not-so watching her path. The violin played and played—and stopped, as the two musicians stared at one another.

The room held its breath, though most would never know why. Armand had taught his child well. Her mind seemed a still pond, and she didn't speak a word as she flung her arms around Antoine’s neck. He responded in kind, gathering her into a tentative embrace. He seemed smaller, thinner, though that was impossible for their kind—more nervous, and he clung to Sybelle as a dying man might a cross.

It would've been scandal for most. However Lestat spoke of freedom and love among their kind, a fledgling was still yoked to their maker, and Lestat had called on those rights. Ah, but Sybelle. "Simple," "mad" Sybelle. She could do as she liked. She raced back toward Armand and grasped his handfuls of sheet music as if he had chosen it rather than she.

He played his part, kissed her bent forehead and bestowed the papers upon her. There were benevolent, patronizing smiles all around, and Armand smiled too. He had given his children many gifts; some, it seemed, without trying.

Sybelle stood in the middle of the quiet Court as if she were at Trinity Gate, her fingers passing over the bars of flattened song to familiarize Antoine with the notes, her head almost upon his shoulder. No one gave them more than a second glance.

They did play lovely music, after all.

With any luck, someone murmured, Notker would lend singers to complete the ensemble.

Armand averted his attention from it and locked his mind down tight, enduring that double-edged silence. As difficult to judge all these others as his maker and his offspring, yet—safety lay in control, and they must not sense any stray thoughts amiss.

Benji’s smooth forehead furrowed, a crease appearing between dark brows like the valley of an unfolded letter. But Armand just smiled reassuringly, told him to go speak with some of their People, and waved Daniel along also to be a voice of experience.

Small talk. Cocktail party conversation, though there were no tidbits of food to compliment or stall with (not in the traditional sense, anyway.) They spoke hollowly about a high society comprised of no particular reason for allegiance, trading uncomfortable mentions of those they knew still to be walking the world as though it were gossip. Proof of the Tribe and the Family, united beneath their beloved God-Prince and his familiar demon.

Armand had been told the thing could look through their eyes, just as Akasha had done while walking with mortal women and with Marius.

And so, the views it might encounter were made—pleasant.

(He’d wondered, on occasion, whether Akasha had ever seen him. He’d wondered why of them all, Amel declined to visit his family.)

The one called Benedict lounged on a couch, eyes far away. Armand considered approaching, but surely Eleni’s sibling would have as little to say to him as to the being currently attempting conversation; a wafting black-haired wraith dead differently than they all were.

Twelve hundred years, Benedict had, but with an attitude of newness. Soft.

Rescued from the flames by his creator-lover.

Daniel’s body trembled, visible from all the way across the room, and Armand whipped his head around to the door by instinct rather than knowledge.

It was too often Armand’s mistake to disregard his maker. That foolishness had robbed his beloved children of their mortal lives, a bitter truth that remained however dearly he cherished them. And now Daniel, too, was affixed to that cord. They were a house under Romanus, the scraps and dalliances left aside after a flight of fancy.

(No, not Daniel. Armand was the one who had set Daniel aside, afraid of his lover Death, afraid of the remembered fanaticism it kindled in him. Despaired of what he was becoming, again and again.)

Marius was at Lestat's right hand, as ever, their conversation cut short as the Roman, too, realized who had come to join them. And on Lestat's arm—  
  
Armand was perfectly still at the sight of his former lover. Louis appeared a work of art dressed in fine silk with precious gems at his throat and on his fingers. His hair fell long and gleaming over his shoulders, a starless night against his deathly white skin.    
  
Louis looked to the crowd, to Sybelle. He smiled at Benji, whose eyes glided away as if nothing were there. But he never once looked Armand's way, and for that Armand was wickedly grateful. This way, he could tell himself that those liquid, probing eyes might have been unbearable, even with his defenses intact.  
  
"No one bothered to tell us things had gotten so interesting!" Lestat seemed childishly put out, as if he didn't now possess the knife that could carve them all open. He intercepted Benji first, shaking his hand with crushing strength, talking a mile a minute before then waving him off with a “talk soon!” promise and utter distraction.

“Was it not you who invited us, Lestat?” Armand asked, accepting Lestat’s sudden regard as Benji floundered in the cold wake of lost attention. “We intended no offense—it simply seemed unnecessary to send someone after you, when you’re surely busy enough.”

“Of course you should have sent someone, imp!” Lestat’s hand went to Armand’s cheek, then his back, thumping brotherly familiarity. “It’s been too long since we saw you, and then it was all so rushed.”

He looked—as he always had. Handsome, of course, wide mouth and wide grey eyes (a little too wide perhaps, too much white around the irises.) The energy running through his frame was almost excessive for a living man.

Armand had loved that face, once. Even after fists had broken his own, he would have followed it, simply for the chance to release control.

“I didn’t realize that you and Louis missed us that much,” Daniel said, leaning in as Marius swanned away without a word.

“We and Louis?” Lestat’s eyes blinked, his features smooth and pleasant. Politely quizzical.

"Uh…" Daniel's face went slack for a moment. Of course—he hadn't directly been party to the most upper echelons of things, sent to converse quietly with companions Marius approved of instead. He hadn't seen Lestat _since._ "Sorry, I forgot about. Him."

There was a beat of awkward silence, and the Silence kept Armand from sensing the disastrous wave of curiosity before it came out of Daniel's mouth. "Are you one person now? Some kind of…Lestat hybrid? Did it meld your brains together somehow?"

Luckily for them both, Lestat laughed. "I'm me, and Amel is himself. Our goals so often align that I find it simpler to speak of us as one." He clapped Daniel's shoulder. "He's glad Akasha spared you. We need that curiosity."

"Yeah, well," Daniel seemed gawky and overgrown, squirming and looking for a way out from under the attention. "Nobody told me it was such a fancy shindig."

"I tried to warn you," Armand told him. _In many ways._

"You always wanna dress me up. You didn't tell me Louis was gonna. That's." He went ever so slightly pink as he looked to the Prince's consort. "You look great, I mean."

"Amazing what a decent eye for coordination can do," Lestat cut in before Louis could answer, and the latter made it seem like no great hardship. He seemed barely aware of the party at all, eyes flicking up only briefly before returning to some introspection.

“They’re lovely, Lestat, thank you,” his quiet voice said _almost_ in response. “I’m glad you like it.”

Mortals at dinner parties had champagne to fiddle with and occupy their hands; even in New York, the family had been so often among them as to become used to the charade.

Louis’s posture looked odd without a glass distraction, and he twisted his emerald ring clockwise about a finger.

“I love it. Truly, where would you be without me?”

Armand had seen Louis kissed before. Often, even; so many changes over the decades. The pride in Lestat’s face was no surprise, for Louis’s love was well worth being proud of winning. Nor was it startling to see frank, flirty lust in the blond’s smile as his lips descended.

What _was_ unusual was the smooth and almost choreographed way Louis leaned up into it, the way his lips parted uncoaxed, the flex of his throat around a partially-muffled moan.

The curve of his body in arms strong beyond their musculature.

“Nowhere, Lestat.” Something smelled faintly of blood when they parted, vampires like sharks smelling a drop miles away. “Dead ages past.”

Daniel flinched uncontrollably, and Armand wondered not for the first time what those long-ago tapes had sounded like, what secrets were revealed in tone and inflection lost to print.

“Don’t say that, mon amour. I adore you; you’ve no idea how it pains me to think—”

(The first person singular was not lost on Armand.)

"You'll never have to," Louis assured him. "I'm right here."  
  
Normally Daniel would've broken the silence, young and irreverent and teasing. But he was struck dumb at the display, holding some private thoughts to which Armand would never again be privy.

"Lestat!" Antoine called from across the room. He seemed the young man he had been at Trinity Gate, racing into the conversation that every eye in the room had studiously looked away from, listening intently. "Lestat, Sybelle has brought the most wonderful music. You must let me show you."

Like a child (weren't they all, those who were not old as time itself or as unyielding as marble) he grasped Lestat's hand, pulling him toward the piano. Lestat went with an air of fond exasperation, basking in the glow of affection. The abandoned parties, all three, stared at one another in silence.

"Nice to see you," Daniel said again, his hand all but outstretched in his attempts to reach out.

"I'd better follow him. Please, enjoy yourselves." Louis left them there, both staring, both with words on the tips of their tongues. They saw no more of him that night.  
  


~*~*~*~

 

The longer they spent in the castle, the more Daniel missed being "the crazy one." He'd dipped in and out of his dissociation, his obsessions, while he was with Marius (no one noticed what was left behind, none of it showy enough to warrant the tittering of a group that still thought Freud was too newfangled); but on his good days he'd still been treated as if he were an empty vessel. And once he'd gotten hold of his anger, it had been very convenient for passing unnoticed.

Now he was aware of the network of piano wires strung around his neck in every direction, and he had no way to blunder through it without getting sliced to ribbons.

He was tired of it, all of it. Being taken tamely out to feed on approved groups of people, “evil” in the most banal and predictable way, as commanded by the Court.

(He remembered sitting in a tiny room within walking distance of the Pink Baby, sweat dripping down his face from more than just the heat as he listened to aesthetics and nihilism and achingly sexual murder.)

(He remembered blameless, gentle, grateful suicides in his arms and his bed, letting go beneath a beautiful evil angel.)

He remembered the blood that he’d swallowed, rich and ancient and nothing like a choice, choking away his voice with bliss.

And that wasn’t even touching the whole— _culture_ of it. Like some whacked-out BDSM resort out of a trash novel.

He remembered Louis talking about masters and slaves, sure; Hell, he'd lived it, walking at the end of a tether that he hated and loved in his last mortal years. But some part of him, some idealistic part, had assumed that it had been at an end when Lestat made his grand apologies and told his great secrets. When Armand had taken Daniel's hand and brought him over (and part of him had been glad, and part of him had missed playing pet; those thoughts had lasted long into his mind's fraying extremes).

In his years with Marius he'd accepted the care, different than Armand's—no give, all take, himself an empty doll to be filled. Of course, he'd told himself. He'd known no better. Of course, he'd thought. That was a problem of ancients, stone-age bastards carved to unbreakable habits.  
  
But here he was in Lestat's Court, the seat of their supposedly new age, and he watched them come and go just the same. Ancients in their long, flowing thawbs and the doting fledglings they kept within arm's length. Soft, _sensitive_ Benedict who'd wept for the carnage and then lopped off Maharet's head, standing alone but for his disgraced maker's shadow at the edges of gatherings. Davis, who Daniel sorely wanted to take out for a night of war stories and dancing, an accessory adoptee taken under wing. None of them spoke to each other; no union of the young was forthcoming. Even when they talked into Benji's little microphone, it was for their masters' ears. Even Gabrielle, in the few moments she could stomach the pomp and circumstance of it all, stayed in Sevraine's orbit.  
  
The only exceptions were the glowing newlyweds, not a year dead and yet nothing less than the idols of the Court. Precious and chosen, struck up for conversation at every turn. It wasn't fair, but after a few nights Daniel felt his stomach turn whenever they entered a room.

It wasn’t jealousy, he told himself. Just—

God, they had it easy.

And god, they were callous. So happy to be killers as byproduct of immortality, the world so much meat for their feeding, because they had grown up pampered children of privilege anyway. Always would have ended up feasting on those less special and favored, even if they grew old and grey in natural fashion.

Not that he was any better, in the end, but he at least _appreciated_ his victims and the moments they gifted him sucking and wet and soft.

Aesthetics were morals, in the end.

Playing nice with Benji made him itch soon enough; he got caught up in the way questions _could_ be phrased to elicit more and to bait the speakers. He took point a few times, eyes wide and gormless as he asked things that cut a hair too close. Benji’s eyes narrowed in the shade of his hat-brim, but he always accepted the answers Daniel’s questions elicited.

And then Daniel saw Marius and one of the other things, the goddamned _ghosts,_ watching him narrow-eyed from across the room, and yeah, he wasn’t well. Not nearly.

 _You left him._ The thought stabbed. _Faithless. He gave you—_

Daniel wasn’t the only “sensitive” young one with “peculiar” habits. His hasty withdrawal from the 56th formal parlor or whatever the fuck caused less stir than a wafting feather.

 _Count. Count. Count._ He told himself, trying to fight the familiar feeling of sounds going muffled, feeling turning fuzzy. He couldn't afford this, not right now. Not when there was so much he still needed to know.  
  
Walking down a dimly lit corridor, he got his wish.  
  
At first he focused on the flash of movement, glimpsed through a just-ajar door, as a way of keeping himself grounded. Then his ears followed, and his curiosity after. There, under a cover of darkness that meant nothing to his vampiric eyes, was his maker, barely visible against the far wall, russet curls a mess. A tall, pale figure held him close.  
  
Dark hair. Immaculate silken shirt, shredded up the back by a jealous hand. And the eye that turned to look at him—  
  
Books had been written on those eyes. Daniel’d written the first one.  
  
He jerked back in a hurry, unsure of why. There hadn't been murder in that look, not even accusation. The dull steadiness of it had been somehow more frightening.

“Louis,” Armand’s voice, the voice of the thing that killed Daniel—the thing that would love you and send you away to be owned and take you back at _its_ pleasure—“Louis, slow down. This is foolish—”

“No time.” Those eyes blinked closed, dismissing Daniel from existence entirely. He felt like another ghost, watching the Prince’s poised consort grab almost savagely at Armand’s round shoulders.

“This isn’t like you—”

“It’s like me now. Don’t—” that voice hadn’t trembled when speaking of his daughter’s death. “Don’t you want me? Aren’t I suitable? Beautiful?”

And then Daniel was watching some strange, possessed grace coil the slim form down, down to its knees before his maker, and Armand was breathing heavily like he needed it, and god, god, it was wrong somehow—

“We’ll be caught.” But his soft hand was on Louis’s chin, tilting the blankly beautiful face up.

 _You have been!_ Daniel screamed in his own head, where Armand would never hear it.

"So we might." There was a dare in his voice.  
  
"And you would do this?" Armand sank down, engulfing Louis' shoulders in an embrace. "After your sacrifices, you would put us all in danger now?"  
  
"I can't." A shudder ran through him, and through Daniel too. "I cannot look into that face and see none of whom I loved in it."  
  
"Louis…"  
  
"If you would keep me here, don't starve me." Louis shoved his face against Armand's throat, and the face Daniel's killer made was ecstasy. All those years of Armand watching from the corner, and now Daniel had his payback.  
  
_So this is why he did it._ His feet were rooted to the spot.  
  
"I am as brutal as all the rest now, I think," Louis said. "I find myself overwhelmed by you. The mere concept of you. I passed years without even the touch of your hand, and now…"

“My despairing one,” said a voice like tragedy.

“Your passionate one. Was that not what attracted you, back at the beginning? I can be passionate.” Daniel had imagined this man, sexually. Fantasized for years of his mortal life to thoughts of what it would be like to get more than just the bare taste of a bite from his Great Scoop. It had never looked like this, panting and desperate and _posed._ Louis’s seductions had always seemed effortless. “Please, take me tonight. Love me, or don’t, but if I’m to be this thing forever—”

“It’s not—”

 _“Forever,_ Armand! After this castle has crumbled to dust, after we’re all as cold and hard as the oldest are now, I will still be smiling up from beneath him, and you all will still be as safe as I can make you. That is my value.” Even sprawled on a thick Oriental rug, hair fanned out and shirt half-unbuttoned to show pale skin and a jeweled pendant, he sounded as wounded as ever Daniel had in Armand’s chill hands. “Isn’t that worth your pity?”

“Not pity.” Armand’s touch was strange and divorced from his face, hands traveling over a body that fairly shook with each barely-there pass. No violence. Not yet. “Not pity, but concern. This is not like you, I said before.”

It hurt, seeing that gentle worshipfulness fall onto one who simply writhed in response.

"I cannot be what you are. I cannot adopt the trinkets of modernity, and I cannot seek my chosen refuge. This castle is out of time. You said to me once you were dying, drowning." He caught Armand's hand, held it to his cheek. "I feel it now. I’ll truly be dead. Nothing tethers me to this masque."

"You feel this way?" Daniel knew that tone. It was Armand feeling the ground break beneath his feet, zeroing in on dissection to keep himself aloft. "You have no attachment left to me?"

"You aren't here." The scent of blood was on the air, and Daniel tensed on their behalf. They could whisper, but blood was ever a clarion call.

"A—ah. If you are waiting for me to leave, I'll ask what I did then: is there anything I can do for you?"

"I've told you."

"There isn't time—"

"If you want me alive next time we meet. I know they won't let my body be destroyed, but they wouldn't mind a shell so terribly."

Daniel felt sick, his knees locking in an attempt to keep him upright. Was this all that waited for him? A world where the old went on, eternally, and those unlucky enough to come after had centuries to realize their fates? _Not us,_ he tried to justify to himself. _Not Armand, not anymore._ But here was Armand in another's arms, and he'd been fooling himself after all.

“He wouldn’t want you like the Queens. He loves you.”

“I’m used every night.” Louis’s leg in its elegant trousers came up, around Armand’s waist, and they rolled gracefully to switch positions. “He wants me. He wants others to want me. I don’t need a mind for that.”

“And so you would force this on _me,_ now?” The iron voice was incongruous with how Armand lay back, wrists held by the white hands that had fascinated Daniel so long ago. “For no reason but because it hurts and you want it?”

Daniel didn’t see the speed of Louis’s recoil, just felt the wind across the room, and thank God it didn’t cause a sonic boom.

The door was blown open wide now, Louis brushing past him without seeing him. It fell to Armand to carry the shock, still splayed out on the floor with his clothes rumpled (where was Louis even going, looking like that?).  
  
"Daniel." Armand sounded wary, and Daniel was preparing to put on a reasonable, forgiving voice when the question came. "Was anyone else here?"  
  
So it wasn't his feelings that mattered, just the threat he posed. No, not even that. Just the attention he might've drawn, standing and staring at that beautiful, ephemeral sight.  
  
"Nobody," he confirmed, and turned on his heel.  
  
He returned to the parlor with a simmering resentment in his guts, no longer in the mood to play shadow to Benji and afraid to look anyone in the face, lest what he'd seen come spilling out his eyes. Louis appeared not half an hour after. No one asked why he was wearing different clothes, if the outfit he'd worn earlier that night was ruined and hidden in the bottom of a bin somewhere. They all flocked to his quiet charm as if nothing were wrong, pulling him into dance after dance.  
  
Armand didn't reappear at all.  
  
Of course not. Daniel had taken a job or two that involved close proximity and a camera, when he'd gotten hungry enough. Even your average unfaithful spouse knew not to look too conspicuous at the same time. And this was akin to playing around on the Don.

Daniel had never been all that bright. Smart, sure. Clever. Talented, even, if only he’d “live up to his potential.” But he’d never known well enough when _not_ to ask questions.

Which was why it felt like some kind of inevitability when he followed Louis into a side corridor as the endless pointless party wound down. (At Versailles, the Sun King had kept his people awake forever.)

“Louis.” It came out flat, and the person in the room with him looked flat. Blank; washed-out. As though something had been dropped on his way out of the spotlight.

“Yes, Daniel?” But there was a familiarity to the deliberate movement of those huge green eyes, the heavy voice. Loose hands, a cheek bitten between molars. S-curved spine and offset hips, exaggerated sibilants.

He swallowed and moved forward. “I’m not gonna ask why you were—” he wanted to. So much. Why he was so little, so inoffensive and useless as to not even be worth hiding from. A cough found its way out of his throat, where sickness hadn’t dwelt in thirty years. “I want to know why you stopped.”

Louis’ body swayed, then folded into an antique Louis Something chair with haunted grace.

“He deserved better,” was the soft reply. Not soft; cloying. Molasses, sucking you under. “I wanted to be hurt, and he didn’t—he, at least, should choose, because that’s why I do what I do. And he reminded me of that.” Bone-china face, exactly as it had been in ‘72. Empty. “You’re a good choice.”

"What, as a consolation prize? A beard?" His father had told him 'better to play second fiddle than not be in the band at all.' What a crock of shit, one that he'd lived for decades. "Great. It's a real honor."  
  
"You must know what it's like for us. It seems it's part of our nature."  
  
"If I thought that was true I'd still be with Marius." _Traitor. Ingrate. Whore._ "If you didn't want to leave, why did you?"  
  
"Because Armand is weak," Louis said simply. "You must have heard it from the lips of all assembled. He's weak, and so am I. But the enemies I made are dead, and his linger still."

"So what, you…sold—"  
  
"I joined Lestat of my own will. I'm sure you saw the publication." Louis looked like spun glass that would shatter with a touch, but his words were steel. "If he loves me, he'll love those I hold dear, too. I would imagine you can understand that better than most."  
  
Daniel barely remembered Akasha, his memory caught up in a haze of new death and fear and the stress of being so constantly close to being snuffed out. When he'd read the book much, much later, it had felt like someone else's life.  
  
"You can't…You can't." All his years as a probing would-be reporter, and he was reduced to repeating himself like a stubborn child.

“I must.” He’d described that face as a cartoon, minimalist and stark-white, back in another life (in life). Now, his eyes and that face had both changed, and it was a horror to see the smile that formed. “Loving my family—your family—is the only good left in my evil. I choose not to have a choice, when my Lords hold me. Would you like to hear a secret?”

Somehow they were close together, their foreheads a whisper from brushing, and the scent of liquor on breath was all in Daniel’s head.

And Daniel had had so many addictions, but none deeper than—“Yes.”

“They’re gentle.” And so were the hands that touched his shoulders, the leg between his own. Louis had seemed ten feet tall in memory, but it was Daniel who would need to dip his head to those sloppy-parted lips. “Always gentle, strong enough not to need to hurt. I used to be so chaste.”

“You’re…”

“Beautiful?” That weakness was all illusion; Daniel couldn’t have fought back against it had he tried, but still he ended up on top on a hideous fainting couch, forced to pin someone he’d put out of mind ages ago. “Be brutal with me. I deserve it.”

He wanted to. God, he wanted to. Why shouldn't he? Armand hadn't exactly proven himself the pillar of monogamy. And this had been in his head for so long. Ever since he'd dreamed of Louis welcoming him into death, gathering him up in those cold, strong arms.  
  
The thought carried him down to Louis' lips, to the burning hot memory of bourbon that he couldn't possibly be tasting. The kiss was as harsh as his remembered dreams, pinned to that wall in Divisadero Street, lingering between death and climax. It carried him that far and no further.  
  
"This place is fucked up." He broke away gasping, letting himself bury his head in Louis' shoulder. "Shit. _Shit."_  
  
"You were always a kind boy." Louis' voice whispered through him as a silver thread descending into Hell. A long, elegant hand stroked Daniel's hair. "I've done you such wrongs."  
  
"Come back to New York," Daniel croaked.  
  
"You know I can't. I know you paid attention to that much."  
  
"Were you always like this?" The Louis of his memory was guileless, innocently horrified at how easily he'd seduced Daniel and everyone. Incapable of conceiving that Lestat had wanted him.

“I was always evil. Tempting. Now I’m wiser, and of use.” No being so strong should still sigh that way; Marius’ marble body would have rebelled at the very thought. “I like you, my dearest’s dear.”

“I thought…” he shook a little in that deranged grasp. “I thought.”

What the Hell had he thought? He’d desired, sure, had _imagined_ a thousand times a panting, whining, lustful creature. But he hadn’t ever really _believed_ it. And it still didn’t seem real, for all the window-dressing.

When he shifted, even a little, Louis squeaked and let his head fall back, throat white and exposed and perfectly angled. It looked sexual. Felt sexual. But—

“You don’t much like screwing, do you?” he managed crudely, tearing his eyes from the throb of a vein below the skin, pulsing perhaps a couple times a minute. If they were alive, Louis would be feeling his need, down where their hips married in a position pointless as it was suggestive. “That’s not what you were asking for at all.”

"It was always of little interest." Louis seemed to contemplate the words as he said them. "'The pale shadow of killing,' I believe I said to her."  
  
"But you and Armand," Daniel prompted. Those sights and sounds had definitely not been faked.

"Our vampiric bodies respond regardless of what our minds, our consciences if you like, desire. And there’s pleasure in being touched by someone I care for." His hand rested on Daniel's hip. "But that is hardly all we do, is it."  
  
No. Every pang of hunger was a knife, and every act of pleasure was violent at its core. Daniel remembered losing himself in it, the frightening exhilaration of moving from death to death, feeling lives melt in his fingers. But he couldn't admit that, not to the mourning creature beneath him. "It doesn't have to be that. We're—we can be better than that."  
  
"Perhaps. You sound a bit like Them. Their every touch is gentle, but that only means Their cruelty has other outlets."

“You said they love you,” he choked out, feeling the crack in his throat like he was 13 again and still trying to talk to Marcus Palmer for no reason at all, no reason why his eyes should burn and his chest hurt.

“They…desire me. And They take pride in others’ desire.” Marble limp as rags, soft as the cushions beneath him, and the cultured mouth spewed filth like normalcy. “You’re pretty, and young; if you don’t want it to be secret, a ménage could be arranged. Though you wouldn’t be able to hurt me, then.”

The disappointed silkiness of the voice was slime—“And you would need to be with Them, of course.”

Hyperventilation. Panic attacks. Those were mortal reactions, or “madness” according to the old farts of their kind.

“I don’t—want—that,” Daniel managed between too-human but utterly real gasps.

“That’s a shame.” With every minute they spoke, Louis ventured nearer to true weakness, actual passivity rather than the mockery he’d given before. “I’d thought you would understand.”

“Fuck you.” It was shocking to say it at last, and even the Consort’s eyes widened a hair in reaction. “FUCK you. You didn’t—you don’t care! You never gave a single thought to me, until after my—Armand—turned you down, you fuckin’—”

(and here words deserted him, not for lack but surfeit.)

"I can't take this." He stumbled to his feet, all but shaking. "You think you're better than them? You sound just like every other rich, entitled, dead bastard I've talked to around here. You're just like them!"  
  
Louis was still, very still. He could've stayed like that, no doubt, and become perfectly like the furniture in this rotten place.  
  
"I'm outta here." He fled before Louis could apologize, coax, move at all. He bolted past the sitting rooms and dark corners filled with illicit doings, past Sybelle still seated at the piano with Antoine beside her. He went to his room ("theirs," their little family, what a crock; why the hell had he come back thinking it would be any different) and started throwing things into a bag. His things, Armand's, things that had come with the room. It didn't matter, did it? They were all possessions in the end. They were all going to end up like Louis, a lifeless soul floating on a dead salt sea of self-preservation.  
  
He could go back to New York and live it up with the knowledge that Armand would never be able to track him down now. He could disappear into a jungle or a dark club and wait for someone to notice him, kill them, and start the cycle again. He could disappear into the earth and wait for all of this to blow over. Now, of all times, the numbness refused to come for him. He was hotly, agonizingly aware of every knife driving into his chest.

But as he walked the halls of the castle, with their mirrors that looked only inward (a trick stolen from Trinity Gate, substitute for the danger of windows), he felt lethargy descend, and remembered Louis’s wilting softness. Not harmlessness, then—just the weakness that came with slow death, and _still_ trying to get fucked.

Daniel had to admire the persistence.

He still hustled his ass on to the room he and Armand had been given, though once there the bed was too much a pain (Armand had refused, he reminded himself. Refused not the love, but the things Louis had begged for, and that was a whole other can of worms.)

The wardrobe was as good as anything, in a castle sealed against the sun.

Or the air.

Or the world itself.

He tried not to laugh at the thought of it as he died. Daniel Molloy, back in the closet.

  


***

  


A haze of numbness was the best defense to a stay in Auvergne, Daniel learned. The invitation they'd been extended hadn't had a set time limit, but somewhere in his brain the idea of "two weeks" had started seeming reasonable. Two weeks to ride out the balls and the plays and the endless chatter, the prescribed killing. And after that…he really had no fucking clue. His offer to help Benji seemed suddenly tainted. What was the point, if they ended up like _that_ in the end?   What was the point in trying to uncover the truth, if they didn't have any power to reveal it? Lestat had found the truth, and it had turned him into a monster, the same as the rest of them.  
  
He'd had depressive funks before, usually when he was too deep in a bottle and smoking his last pack, but none had ever felt as strangulating as this. He didn't want to die, he just wanted to _stop_ . Everything seemed like an enormous crushing weight. And still, Armand was nowhere to be found.  
  
"Daniel?" A callused hand caught his arm and jostled him out of his thoughts. Antoine was looking at him in perplexity. _Wonder if he's lost his will to live yet_ .  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"Sybelle wanted to know if you had any backup recording equipment. She…we'd been working on a few things, and she wanted to take them home. To practice with."

He hadn’t paid Lestat’s unwanted offspring much mind, back when they lived together; the man had seemed nothing but a mooning accompanist to Sybelle, the answer to a line Daniel had always regretted not pursuing during that first fateful night when all questions were permitted.

Honestly, Sybelle’s upset at Antoine’s summoning to court had been the most interesting thing about him, though nothing new. Sybelle had been moody since Daniel arrived.

When Antoine’s hand raised and lowered, and his forelock fell into his blue eyes bashful, Daniel realized he’d been silent too long. He swallowed to wet his mouth and rapped out a careless reply: “Got a phone, but I don’t really carry the tape recorder around with me now. Y’tried asking Benji? He’s Mr. Large-and-in-Charge there.”

Antoine’s lips thinned. “He and Sybelle are…disagreeing.”

“No shit.” The words made their way out tainted with genuine surprise, because the Kids had been such a unit. “Benji been too distracted to spend time with her?”

“No. It’s…” Antoine’s hand darted out like a snake to catch Daniel’s wrist. “Won’t you look at what we have, anyway? Just to help?”

Part of him wanted to say 'not really' and retreat back into his sulk, but the other part was still the vampire he'd been at his death—in love with anything new, anything engulfing, anything that would obliterate the bitter old bastard he'd been well on his way to becoming. "Sure, why not."  
  
They were still camped out at that same grand piano, the one that probably cost as much as a whole block of apartments—if Daniel didn't bother to ask why their preying on evildoers didn't include the bloated fucks at the top of the food chain, wringing every drop from the poor souls beneath their feet, it was because he already knew the answer. Sybelle's eyes were on him as soon as he stepped through the doorway, piercing in a way that unsettled him.  
  
"I should warn you I'm not much of a critic." He sat sideways in one overstuffed chair, marveling at how uselessly cluttered the room looked now that it was empty of its undead guests. "Music wasn't my forte."  
  
Antoine snickered a little, and it took Daniel a minute to catch on to his own joke. "It's fine." Antoine waved his hand dismissively. "We'd love to play for you, but I wanted to know how you're getting on first."  
  
"Missing New York. Y'know how it goes…” he winced. "I guess you really do, huh."  
  
"Mmm. I always intended to go where I was wanted." Antoine's face was downcast. "I didn't anticipate there being options."

“Because…of Sybelle.” He bit his lower lip. “I don’t think she can stay here.” It was a hard thing to try to explain to people who seemed so disconnected at times, but surely Antoine hadn’t been around Armand long enough to understand how vital she was to keeping him steady. What _purpose_ she’d been given at her creation.

“No!” Antoine looked horrified at the suggestion, as though someone might wander in and gobble his girlfriend up.

“I will not.” It took a moment for Daniel to register the origin of the soft, tuneless voice, so unused to it was he. “It’s a bad place. I won’t stay here. I won’t be locked up.” Her hands didn’t stop, still conjuring soft, unsettling ripples of sound like waves on a darkened beach. Daniel had spent so much time on beaches; he wondered what his island was like, these days.

“I. I mean.” Speak _to_ her, he reminded himself, suddenly aware of how he’d hated being talked for and about and around, back when they all agreed that he was ‘mad.’ “You don’t want to stay with Antoine? Just because people are…insensitive?”

“She shouldn’t stay here. I told her as much.”

A pang went through Daniel's chest. _I don't want you_ . That phrase was damn familiar to him, either spoken or implied. "I didn't ask you," he snapped. "I asked her."  
  
"I won't stay here," she repeated. "I want Antoine to come home. And—"  
  
Antoine made a shushing motion, as if it mattered in a house full of old psychics. "We've got to endure it. I'm a flash in the pan. They'll tire of me soon." He took her hand, her all-important hand, and she let him. Thin, nimble fingers laced with callused ones.  
  
A dim picture was beginning to coalesce in Daniel's head. "Worried about the blowback if you're less than appreciative of the Prince's kind invitation?"  
  
"For years, all I wanted was Lestat." Daniel'd read the account, of course, compressed as it was. "Even now, being near him is…overwhelming."  
  
Sybelle didn't bat an eye at the confession, and Daniel felt some misplaced pride. The old monogamy was dead. Long live whatever the fuck this was. Still, he asked: "You alright with that?"  
  
She stared, then frowned, seeming to grasp for an answer she hadn't the words to put together. "It's sprezzatura," she offered. When he looked blank, she turned on her bench and played a snippet of music—notes that tumbled together and over each other, each seeming to jostle for attention.

He’d heard the word before, some old courtly term. The art of artlessness, making everything look easy.

More interestingly, he was familiar with the technique of disruptive distraction; he’d often set his own thoughts in shambles just to make them slick and unpalatable for others to read.

(Others.)

(Lovers.)

(A lover who could hear him.)

The sounds jangled his nerves, while Antoine futzed with his damned violin, plucking out tuneless sounds that slid in and pierced any time Sybelle’s work became too close to music.

“Bad place,” he murmured. “Because of the people? You said Louis and Lestat will get tired of you?”

He’d played toy for a wealthy couple in late ‘79, let them both get their jollies off his willing body in exchange for trinkets and gifts that Armand lined up on the window ledge of a shithole apartment across town, symbols of who knew what, but always there to admire when Daniel came for his fix.

The double murder had been in all the papers. Another Manson, people had fretted.

"It isn't Louis," Antoine said. "Louis never asked for any of it."  
  
"Not what I heard." Heard, saw; felt, his body unable to process the wrongness of what he'd always wanted.  
  
"You don't understand." The ferocity in Antoine's voice was surprising. "You aren't here."  
  
"So tell me," Daniel countered, putting on the white noise in his head that was always mindful of listening ears.  
  
"They're always…" Antoine had the modesty to blush. "It's like Lestat's possessed by some demon."  
  
Daniel smiled ruefully. All Armand's thoughts of their damnation had apparently rooted deep, even after such a small amount of time at Trinity Gate. "He was always a sex fiend, or so I heard."  
  
That set Antoine's cheeks ablaze. "Not like—he plays games. He stalks us out of the shadows, or makes these elaborate _scenes_ you just…Louis acts like none of it bothers him, but that's impossible. You stop feeling like yourself. You stop feeling human, until you're waiting for them to tell you what to do." Antoine shuddered, arms around himself.  
  
"I only wanted to play one song," Sybelle said. "It was comforting. I went in circles, but the pattern was soothing. There, things made sense."

“And Louis leaving threw off your rhythm?” Daniel tried to match her metaphors, since he couldn’t speak her language.

“He didn’t want to. We should want to be where we are.” Her music developed a monotonous deedle-deedle-deedle-deeeeet until a loud twang from her accompanist broke it up.

Her eyes seemed huge.

“Yeah, well. Like the song says—you can’t always get—”

“What you want,” finished the other person in the room old enough to have lived through the Stones. “But it also says that if we try, we get what we need.” Antoine smiled suddenly, teeth showing without guile. “Pleased to meet you,” and the stilted rhythm of the words carried all the import.

“…Hope you guessed my name,” Daniel batted back, feeling lead in his chest and hearing the most awfully recognizable trill to go with it. "I wouldn't exactly call this taste." Daniel still felt shabby next to the gleaming black wood, the fine silks and finer bookcases stacked with unopened quaint and curious volumes and the hideous _putti_ gazing down blankly upon it all. "But I feel you."  
  
"No, you don't. Sympathy doesn't cover it." Antoine's strings sang out for him. "You're consumed and then come up for air like a drowned man. There is nothing to grasp onto here, save him. Save books and other delusions. I barely know myself. Night after night, week on week…our Prince dotes on him without fail, chattering too loud to hear anything but his own voice. And they are always together."  
  
It was all beginning to make a queasy sort of sense. That starved, empty look in Louis' eyes haunted him still, but differently now. "So if he didn't want to go…why did he?"

 _Why did I?_  
  
"Armand," Sybelle said simply. "The others hate Armand."  
  
_Hard to blame them_ , part of Daniel thought. He carried his own share of bitterness over the lies, the secrets, the exhausting game of cat and mouse and all the rest (and most of all, that Armand had told his story for another, to another, when it was the one thing Daniel had wanted as dearly as the blood).  
  
"Shouldn't matter, should it?” He projected carelessness in his voice and in his heart, loath to think too deeply on this sickly scene. “Armand's one of the ancients, practically. He never had any trouble clearing out other vampires." Daniel hadn't even felt sorry for the poor bastards back then, too drunk on his own fortune.

“The biggest reason to hate. Now that we are a tribe.” Antoine’s face fell into reminiscence, and Daniel could almost physically _feel_ the pull back to 1984 and its terrors. Fire and screaming, cities cleaned out while Daniel read and hallucinated and shivered on park benches in Chicago. Red hair in his mind, and blood in his throat, and selfish selfish salvation. “Though killing the weak was always what it pushed for, now…because he was not driven by _It_ when he acted…”

So many of the people at the dinnerless parties murmured and fretted about what they’d been ‘forced’ to do, how it had confused them to come to in the midst of fire and rage—

Armand had been driven not by some spirit-voice, but by terror and logic. Might makes right, makes safety, and wasn’t that precisely what this whole hellish Court ran on anyway?

Shouldn’t they admire Armand, for stepping up to the plate?

Shouldn’t he hate all the more, if Armand had been the one to force _this,_ make Louis into a pawn?

He'd read in Lestat's little volume about the offer extended to Armand, the role of executioner. _No one wants to see how the sausage gets made. No one wants to think about the icky little details_.

“I guess Lestat doesn't need anyone to do that dirty work anymore, does he,” Daniel said. Of course, Rhoshamandes's arm had only been a part of him, not the whole, but Daniel still remembered that moment, seen from his quiet vantage point. He still remembered the almost manic gleam in the Prince's eyes. For a moment none of them were sure that he would stop, even after he'd gotten the information he sought.

"It was said things will be different now," Antoine looked down as he said it, fingers itching and anxious. Sybelle scooted over to let him sit at the bench, giving him access to the keys.

"And I bet some people would just love an excuse to get rid of bad memories," Daniel finished. His Armand was brutal, and when he lashed out none survived. Daniel couldn't deny that. But he lashed out in the way of a cornered animal, frightened and unable to see any other option. Coming to realize this had felt like some special revelation, once. Now it felt dangerous that Daniel was the only one who had managed it.

“Louis makes new ones, instead.” A song Daniel recognized from Webber, of all things, floated up around them. “Louis softens it. He’s very…” The musicians both caught their lower lips between their blunt incisors, eerie duet synchronization.

“He hurt you.” Antoine picked up a thread (who knew whether it was the same one—all so tangled, now—) “I don’t think he means to. I think he tries—not. When I knew him—thought I knew him— _never had time for a wife / and he’s talking with Davy / who’s still in the Navy / and probably will be for life.”_

“Yeah, you’re the piano man.” Daniel rolled his eyes and cracked his knuckles. “And he’s queer, I got it.”

“Like fuck you,” said Sybelle’s toneless voice, vulgarity sitting with uncomfortable commonness there. “Not gay as in happy.”

“Who here is, honey?”

"Lestat, maybe," Antoine said. "But I can't be sure how he's changed, and how he's been changed."  
  
"Does it matter?" Daniel asked.  
  
"We all…"  
  
"Yeah, long time lines, I get it. We're killers. At least I'm not fooling myself about that. But all of this…turning Louis into _that_. What the hell does it matter what he meant, if this is what he did?"

Antoine had no answer for that, and Sybelle turned back to her keys.

"I need to…I need to think." Daniel swayed as he stood, like he could still get drunk.

"Are you going to look for Louis?" Antoine seemed both hopeful and afraid.

"I dunno," he laughed. "That's a first. He's right here, and now I don't want to chase him."

"We'll find you when it's time to come home." Sybelle was already turned away from him, attention consumed by the piano.

He should've felt happy to be included, but he couldn't even appreciate that right. Here he'd thought the rug had finally stopped getting pulled out from under him.

  


***

 

The halls of the castle were still too quiet—or perhaps that was simply Armand’s mind, alienated from outside thoughts as surely as though all there were his fledglings or his makers (mentors, now, apparently. Such terminology. Time had been when words meant something, and mentors were those who _shaped,_ not just created.)

He’d heard with both ears and mind when Benji spoke to him earlier of plans and ambitions and spread wings, a studio closer to the _real_ stories of their Court, but he didn’t want to believe. It had taken a long stretch of centuries for Armand to learn how not to believe.

How not to shout and slap the boy for ingratitude, spell out things that his tall, small son should be old enough to understand unspoken—and so he sought focused his mind elsewhere instead.

He would be glad to be gone from this place, able to relax and think clearly once more. But first, he must do his duty by showing courtesy to the one who dearly purchased his and his children’s freedom, however abominable that person’s conduct had been. However enticing and strange. However those children failed to accept the gift.

One didn’t carelessly slip into the Consort’s very bedchamber; it was the height of folly, but also private.

And with Louis sequestering himself from contact these past few nights, “exhausted” by all the people as any introvert would be and begging their Prince’s indulgence with smoky promise of recompense in his eyes, it left Armand little choice.

It reminded him of his time as a mortal: secret and illicit and daring, his senses blunted now by his own overcaution rather than mortality. Back then he had been acting on his master's orders and in defiance of them, desperate not to be ignored. He wasn't so sure it was different now. He had often thought himself in command of his own faculties only to find it was not so; regardless, he had chosen.

He moved slowly, relying on eyes and ears and scent, his mind a dead limb. The chambers were not a single room but a suite of them, blazing with light and filled with furniture of another age. The large four-poster bed, ornate and unnecessary, took up the bulk of the main room. It was empty. So too was the first closet, and the adjoining sitting room. Armand's nerves tightened with every unremarkable sight, well-trained as he was to expect the worst. Would he come upon his love's body now, withered and dry and still twitching?

The last room was dense with magnificent clothes, many untouched and gathering dust. Armand recognized some as things Louis had worn on previous nights, finely adorned in a manner he had always groused about in Armand's home. He wore them now without comment, expression, or thought. His mind was closed to Armand's here.

Louis himself knelt in the corner, bent over something and almost trembling. At the soft whisper of Armand's foot on the carpet, he jumped.

The smile on his face as he turned was a mask aimed a head too high. “Coming, my love—”

It took Louis too long to focus and comprehend his intruder’s identity, far longer than the movement of his hands squirreling away the object of his attention beneath a vivid-toned pocket square. Armand had seen a film, once, about the creation of ideal spouses, replacing the individuals with simulacra suited to others’ needs rather than their own. Practical. Eminently understandable.

He’d not wanted to assist in such, though, always preferring to _observe_ his lovers’ vagaries. He and Lestat were very different.

“Armand.” Louis’s voice was hushed as that of a believer in a church. “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to bother you so.”

His expression was frozen and false, obscuring what was beneath as surely as Armand’s shields, and for the same reason: Safety. Yet apologies were not what he sought, and so he stepped closer.

“Your conduct did bother me, for you seemed unwell.” _Horny,_ Daniel might say, but hadn’t, because this was not—minor.

“I’m sorry,” Louis looped the words again, recitation without meaning. “I’ll stop.” His hands clamped harder about the bit of green satin, yielding a sound of stressed plastic despite the fact that he could surely crush anything made by human means if he truly so desired. Strength and control. And yet he shook like a child fearing a whipping as Armand advanced.

"I've never sought to stop you." What a lie. He'd stopped Louis' very heart with his schemes. "Only to understand."

Louis' eyes narrowed. His shoulders curled in. Without the power of his mind reading, they were actions without significance to Armand. "Tell me what you're thinking," he pressed.

"Is it not enough that anyone can walk about in my mind? I must give it?" Louis wouldn't look at him.

"I hear nothing. It isn't safe here. Unsubtle hands could rend my defenses to pieces." He knelt at his lover's side. "What is  it you have?"

Louis had a beautiful smile, even here. "Nothing." Still, he peeled back the vivid green fabric, revealing the scratched and battered phone he'd taken across the sea. "It seems this tool is no longer of use to you."

"You've been using it?"

"No pretenses, please," Louis said. "Even my Southern nature has had its fill of it. Surely you saw."

"No," Armand shook his head. "Knowing I would see you, knowing it might endanger you, I left mine behind."

Louis stared at him for almost a minute, unblinking, and then began to laugh. He covered his dry eyes, a shudder passing through his limbs and remaining long after the sound had subsided.

Louis didn’t cry, as a rule. Armand had never understood that, their first time around. And despite all that had changed without and within them both, some things remained the same for better or worse. Like how he didn’t resist, either, save in his silent, passive endurance. Save for how his lids fell shut and his lips pursed, but his fingers were soft as a new corpse’s, yielding the little phone up or just not fighting its loss when Armand took it.

“They’re all deleted. If you care for my dignity, you’ll dispose of them unread once you reach home, as well.”

“Why would I wish to do that?” Armand asked slowly, taking in the red backlight of the thing. “I’ve no letters to remember you by, after all.”

“You don’t wish for my words, anyway. Nor my body.” His former lover’s body should have fallen towards him, for support, for comfort, but instead it slumped against the wall.

“Both, my love.” He began to scroll awkwardly. “And you did not delete _everything.”_

[sorry i ruined it all. I wish i had done it properly just asked u about home let u tell me stories of it fill me that way. I wish i could be happy for ur new lover. I’m sorry i tried plz just tell me how 2 fix i promise ur all safe]

At first it had charmed Armand to see Louis’s growing frustration with the limitations of the little phone: in their time at Trinity Gate Armand had been intrigued by this new permutation of language, while Louis had taken up arms for the sake of grammar. That fondness had become poisoned once he realized Louis was acting in haste, jotting out messages as one might send codes from behind enemy lines.  
  
"Louis." He started to reach out but stopped himself. No, Louis had not come toward him. He was often particular about touch, Armand recalled; it was one area where he had continued abusing his mental powers. Now he was at a loss. "Daniel told me to find you."  
  
"I see. To say goodbyes, I take it." Something more, something unseen, seemed to escape Louis and hang miasmic in the air.

"Yes." It was true. "We aren't needed here, nor wanted. Except for Benji, perhaps."  
  
He set the phone aside, carefully, and risked taking Louis' hand in his. "Come back to New York."

"How could you ask me that. After this. After all I did in coming here."  
  
"I stood by and allowed your death, once. Not in body, but soul. I thought it inevitable, then, just as the hatred between makers and fledglings. But Daniel has come back to me, and I need not be powerless as you suffer."

“Daniel has come back to you.” The hand he held shifted, away, towards, uncertain in its movements as though Louis couldn’t quite decide what to do with it. “I’m glad.”

“You don’t sound it.” How Armand wanted to tilt up the pointed chin and see that familiar face in full. For Louis knew words and speech as Armand did not, and could mean a dozen things with a single phrase. “You said that you _wished_ you could be happy for him.”

Louis’s magnificent eyes closed, a thin line slicing in between his fine narrow brows, and his head fell back against the wall with a soft _thump._ “I wish many things. Right now, I wish…”

He looked so soft, like Armand’s captured darling in the first nights after the fire. Dying, frail, nearly human.

After a pause of long long seconds, Armand dared to rub his thumb along an elegant joint and whisper, “You wish?”

If he crouched, it was only because they were on the floor. Only natural.

“I shouldn’t,” Louis whispered.

“Tell me, before I must leave this place.”

“I wish you would hold me. I wish I deserved it, and that either of us were free to permit it.”

He smiled. The others, in their books, had described his smile as beatific, but he had never asked for the mantle (it hadn't stopped him from using it to his advantage). Now, though, his expression was for Louis alone. "That is within my power."

He sank fully to his knees, small and yet so fully in control. All his nights in the castle he had pined for an ounce of power, and it came over the one he had at long last learned not to misuse.

"Come here," he whispered, carefully cupping Louis' head and laying it against his shoulder. Louis was stiff at first, tense and still listening hard. As Armand stroked his hair his shoulders began to unknot, slowly, slowly, until Armand could no longer help himself. Against his better judgement, he opened his mind.

Shame had in some ways always seemed a constant with Louis; so, too, guilt. But this thing which battered Armand like a wave in a storm was curiously different from any other time—for in the aftermath of what Armand did to his daughter, Louis’s mind had been hushed with grief. Any appalled reactions to his own conduct, or to the way Armand could make him behave, were distant at best.

And in the new century, in their new home, he’d dared to hope that those wounds were diminished by healing.

Now—

The sheer intensity of his beloved’s self-loathing scalded his skin, like a wire-brush bath meant to remove dirt and lice with no regard for comfort.

 _Sorry,_ Louis was thinking again, so encompassing as to have no meaning to it—sorry for leaving, sorry for wanting, sorry for asking for something he’d never wanted so badly before. Sorry for letting Lestat change him, sorry for not changing enough.

Sorry for not being that way when he’d _had_ Armand, sorry for so often desiring only this—only comfort and touch and a strong hand at his neck.

It was almost more than Armand's mind could bear, the stimuli battering his brain until he could not longer process, only sink. _Why_ , he wanted to send back. _Why, why, why_. He had no concept of how to drain such an ocean of feeling, how to grapple with a depth of despair he had only felt on the eve of his attempted self-destruction.

He realized his body was falling too, sagging under the weight of the shock. Louis' arms were coming up to embrace him, cradling him against that pale chest.

 _Sorry_ , again, this time for sharing. That, at least, Armand understood, and he balked. He was not fragile, not so fragile as this, that he couldn't bear the weight of his own curiosity, or the obligation of his beloved's pain. It was for Armand's strength that Louis was here and not hidden away in a secluded corner of the world.

"I do not demand your desire." He loathed speaking when he didn't have to, but Louis so loved words—the sight of them, the sound of them. "But I welcome it, if that truly is your need."

"So—"

"But I will not be your master. I will not assuage your guilt, not least because it is senseless. I have rescinded that power." His hand, warm with death, found its way inside Louis' haphazardly buttoned shirt. "In the end, you would hate me again."

“Never. Never again.” Truth stung and gratified all at once, and this was one of the many reasons one need not seek completion with Louis: his very presence at times exuded the essence of the act.

“Come back with us,” he whispered once more against the softness below an ear lobe.

“I can’t,” Louis replied, the air gaining an erotic tang of blood which stirred Armand in spite of himself, and all right, yes, he _did_ still want the act. But more important were the words gifted to his ears:

“He would not allow it. They would not. They need—I think it…explores. And it makes him feel good.” A soft shiver issued from one or the other of them. “I think I see him, and that’s when I’m more frightened. Because surely he is the source of the passions, and if I fail…”

“Can you bear it?” Armand’s body was small, his reach meager, his strength and influence negligible in this their modern Court. “Until they grow bored, perhaps?”

“They won’t grow bored.” Such conviction. “Not for many years—if they were bored, surely _this_ wouldn’t be enough.” Images of blood, and flesh, and humiliation, and below that fire and fear. “I won’t let them become bored, and so I must bear it.”

Brave, foolish, desperate. Certain that he could stand strong against the demon in his bed, that he could seduce and hold it tight. Such black wings—So childishly stupid, and damnation take Armand for accepting the use of that naivete.

Still that odd, perverse edge of desire rose between them, and still Louis held himself contained.

“What is it you need, before I go?”

Louis held Armand's face in his hands, their lips a breath apart. "Leave some of yourself here to sustain me."

"Will he taste it?"

"I don't care," Louis smiled, his mind a fragmented jumble. "Let him know I am desired. Let him know he will not have all of his wife. Let—No." He shook his head, repeating the word. "No, forgive me. My selfishness is unconscionable. I just."

Armand silenced him with a kiss. "There are precious few who have received my blood. Fewer still I have granted it to willingly."

"I know."

"I cared for Daniel even when he was lost to me and you were at my side. And the same is true now that you are here. Do you understand?" He undid the buttons at his collar, revealing the length of his throat. "Drink, and know you still hold my heart."

Louis clutched at him fiercely, scenting his hair, his clothes, like an animal. He pressed kiss after kiss to Armand's throat, but held back from the bite, until Armand's frame shook in the seclusion they shared.

“Do it, my love,” he whispered, voice cracking with the ache of it as it had when he was a boy, and unlike then the fangs wrenched away.

He wanted to scream at the tease, until Louis spoke again.

“I haven’t the right—”

“Every right. You are—”

“Not your lover. Your Daniel would not approve; I disgust him, surely.”

“He sent me. Told me I had to see you, before we left for home.” Perhaps Armand’s incomprehensible progeny knew something of this pain and desperation locked tight inside Louis’s soul. Whatever the reason, that statement made Louis sag and whimper.

 _“Home.”_ It wasn’t just a word; the very _concept_ echoed and resounded in the pit of Armand’s chest, painful in equal measure to the denial of his stirred need. “It’s such a good place, dear one.” And then the immensely strong being in his arms turned liquid. “Take me back there. Just a bit of me.”

Armand had so many reasons. Because Louis asked. Because this was safer by far than the other way. Because Daniel had sent him, and surely that one knew. Because it would be a brief comfort in an hour of need. Because he would be leaving, and so out of danger following this infringement.

But when he lay Louis down upon the thick carpet among expensive clothes perfumed by cedar, when he unbuttoned a collar as tenderly as a proper gentleman seducing a virgin to pleasure rather than violation, when he used his hands and his lips and then those devilish ivory implements peculiar to their kind, the greatest reason of all was simply—

He desired it.

It had been a hundred years since he thought of this person as his savior, for Louis couldn't bear the weight of such a responsibility. The deep, devouring pit of Armand's need had swallowed up that persistent flame. He had learned instead to be careful at husbandry, gentle as he laced their fingers together, as he gasped under the ecstasy of that never-forgotten taste.

He sent all the love he'd harbored, the feelings he couldn't express in words spoken or written. He tried to wrap Louis in the sensation, to weave a world of them as he'd done before. It was harder now that it was truth rather than calm that he sent. It was fragile, resting on the instability of Armand's feelings. His sure, devoted, ruthless feelings. In turn, he imprinted the feeling that made up "Louis" as hard as he could into his mind.  

When they parted, Armand picked up  the phone and pressed it into Louis' hands. "I must protect myself now. Please, do not let yourself be lost to me."

It ached to close his mind again, to shut himself off from the landscape around him into the limits of his small, insufficient body. Louis held him as he did, kissing each of his fingers and every exposed inch of his face.

"Promise me you will survive," Armand said.

"They will never let me die."

"No. Your heart.” Armand kissed the healing wounds he’d left. “Preserve it, not for my sake but your own."

Louis was silent for a long time. "If you will promise something in return."

"Yes," Armand agreed readily.

"Come back. Do not abandon me here."

His throat was thick with regret as he nodded, imagining what it took for his love-loved-lover to speak such a request aloud. Louis had a horror of appearing needy, coupled oddly to his soft, receptive center. “I promise. We will visit, when we are invited…” Dirty of him, to take a kiss here, to cling like honey to the side of a glass. “When you need us, or when your Prince commands.”

“It’s not a duty.” So clever, picking up the thread provided. So cruel of Armand to sow the reminder in this sacred time, to begin drawing them back up to reality. “I’ll keep you all in my heart regardless. You needn’t—give of yourself, if you don’t want to.” _(As though anyone would ever fail to want that—)_ “Just let me see you, and feel you. Hold your hand in the moonlight, once or twice a decade.”

He nodded tightly, feeling his curls brush his cheeks and hide his face even as Louis’s curtains had descended earlier. When he rose, he wobbled, dizziness acute and unexpected, and oh.

“You’ve been drinking.”

“Evildoers,” Louis bland unworried face spoke no truths, and shut off, Armand could not chase the falsity of it.

No time, and anyway, the alcohol would not eat at Louis’s body as it had his other dearest one.

He carried that image of his love away with him, desperately ill from the air of evil that pretended it was not so. His dear ones, when he gathered them, seemed diminished by their visit. Sybelle was silent, not just in words but a coldness in her mind that balked even at his touch. Benji, meantime, clung close to his equipment, still unpacked in the corner of the foyer where their goodbyes were said. His black  eyes darted to Daniel and then away again, and he kept trying to grasp Sybelle’s wrists and shoulders. She was shut down, though, simmering with an anger and hurt that she kept admirably suppressed for some later explosion.

After all this, Armand’s boy was staying behind  
  
Daniel walked like a man casually escaping Hell, as if that eternal state had not been Armand's cursed gift to him. When Armand reached for his hand to stop him from going too far ahead he jerked away, eyes looking anywhere but to his maker. That was alright. Armand had brought him into death knowing what consequences might come.  
  
They were all silent as they took the carriage, the train, and walked back to the private jet.  Only when they were in the air, miles and miles from the eyes of Court, did Daniel curl against his side.


End file.
